A little less noise. More signal.

The integration of GenAI tools into higher education assessment raises important questions about how students understand, interpret, and respond to AI-mediated evaluation. As instructors increasingly explore AI tools for providing feedback, prior research has examined whether GenAI-generated feedback improves writing performance and how students perceive its usefulness; comparatively little is known, however, about how students interpret such evaluation when they are explicitly informed that an AI system, rather than a human instructor, produced the feedback and the score. This study reports findings from a qualitative pedagogical inquiry conducted in an undergraduate technical communication course for computing students at a Saudi public university. Thirteen male undergraduate computing students completed an in-class handwritten writing task; the scanned submissions were evaluated by ChatGPT using a rubric-based prompt aligned with the task objectives. Students were then explicitly informed that ChatGPT had generated the score and feedback and were invited to reflect on the evaluation in writing. Inductive thematic analysis of these reflections identified four themes: perceived usefulness of feedback; awareness of AI's contextual and pedagogical limitations; conditional trust, distinguishing feedback utility from evaluative authority; and reflection on the institutional and pedagogical role of the human instructor. Participants accepted GenAI feedback as useful for surface-level revision but consistently positioned the human instructor as the appropriate authority over grading decisions. The study identifies this as a distinction between feedback utility and evaluative authority, two judgments that students treat as analytically separate rather than as opposite ends of a single approval scale...